“Are they all dead?” I asked. There was too much anger and sadness to comprehend anything but the cool wash of blood draining from my face. I wasn’t sure that even Jake could sustain a gunshot wound, not if it had been to his head.
The man took another drink, ignoring the hysteria lacing my voice.
“Are they dead?” I screeched. “Did you kill them?”
With the back of his hand, the man wiped his mouth and stared at me. His eyes filled with sadness and regret so poignant that I didn’t need my Ability to feel it deep in my soul.
“Oh my God,” I whispered. They’re dead. His look said it all.
Tears welled and fell, rolling down my cheeks, and I suddenly couldn’t breathe. “Why?” I choked out, rage blooming too intense to keep inside me. I pulled against the ropes, tugging and screaming louder than the pain ever could. “Why? What the fuck do you want from me? What do you want? Tell me what you want!” I sobbed, wondering if it even mattered anymore.
In an instant, the man’s hand clamped over my mouth. I could taste the salt on his skin, and his nose was so close it was almost touching mine.
“Shut up,” he said, though I barely heard him through my muffled whimpering. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll shut up.” His tone was level and deliberate. An obvious warning.
I squeezed my eyes shut and sobbed against his hand, not caring what his intentions were as I thought about my companions—about my dad, about Jake—probably still lying out in the middle of the road somewhere.
I turned away from the man, away from his tight grip on my mouth, and cried into someone else’s pillow. “Why did you have to kill them?” I croaked. “You could’ve just taken me. You didn’t have to kill them.”
“I didn’t,” he said, his breath cloying and moist against my cheek.
Swallowing mid-whimper, I reluctantly shifted my gaze to his. I didn’t care that our noses were touching or that I could see into his eyes, filled with an emptiness so haunting it made me sick with dread. But still, I dared to hope… “They’re not dead?”
The man sat up, the mattress squeaking beneath the sudden movement. “Not all of them. We only killed who we had to,” he said with what sounded like remorse.
I didn’t understand. I tried to stifle the sobs bubbling up. “Who’s…we?” I felt my lips quivering. “Who did you kill?” I asked more softly. The tears multiplied, knowing his answer would ruin me, regardless of who it was.
“The driver and the man with you. They were the only ones conscious.”
My heart squeezed and twisted, hope and sadness sparring inside for control. All I could do was pray that they’d shot Jake in the chest and not in the head. And Tavis… I sniffled. I’d already known he was gone. I’d watched the color drain from his face and the light dull in his eyes.
He was trying to save me.
I tried not to think about the others, doing all I could to convince myself that they’d survived the crash and that Jake, at least, would come for me.
Suddenly, my anguish turned to hope and my sadness to hate and rage and determination. Sooner or later, someone would find me, or I would get away. I just had to be strong, to hold on and figure out how to tell them where I was.
I glared at my captor, teeth clenched as I silently promised him horrible things to come.
But his murky brown eyes held no fear or amusement. In fact, they were devoid of much emotion, save for what I thought might be apathy and compliance. Given his lackluster emotions, it seemed primal lust and physical dominance weren’t among the reasons I’d been taken, and I felt my anxiety lessen just a little.
“Why did you do this?” I asked, more steadily this time, though tears still streamed down my cheeks—tears for Tavis and my unknown future, for the rest of my friends and family, who I prayed were still alive. “Why did you have to kill them?”
The man stiffened and stood, the floorboards creaking beneath each footstep as he walked back over to the boarded-up window. I wondered what he kept looking at.
Furtively, I glanced around the room. With the pinks and whites and purples accenting the bed and walls, it looked like a little girl’s bedroom. His daughter’s room, maybe. I assumed she was dead, whoever she’d been, but I needed to learn more, to figure out what they wanted, how many they were, and where, exactly, I was. I needed to find a way out.
It would be too naive to think I’d been brought back to New Bodega, where I’d first seen the scarred-faced man—that I’d be so close to home. There was no salt scent in the air, and I could hear no ocean breeze outside like I could at home, either. “Answer me, please,” I pleaded. “You followed us—why? What do you want with me?”
This time, the man glared over his shoulder, an angry glint brightening his deadened eyes. But he didn’t answer, and it worried me that I still couldn’t sense his mind. There was a wall, an obscurity that only strengthened the harder I tried. Or was it all in my head? Was my Ability now nonexistent? I couldn’t tell as a sharp pain shot through my head like a Taser keeping an unwanted perpetrator away.
“What do you want?” I shouted, too impatient to play his game.
He frowned, his eyes hardening. “If you keep screaming, Randall’s going to come in here and you’re going to regret it, just like the others. I guarantee you that.”
My anger fizzled. The others?
He turned back to the gap in the boards. “I told you to rest.” As if he couldn’t stand to be in the room with me a moment longer, or perhaps didn’t trust himself, the man clomped past the bed without a glance in my direction. He snatched the vodka bottle off the dresser and flung open the door, exposing a hallway. I saw a chair and shotgun propped up against the wall before he slammed the door shut again behind him.
Alone, tied to a bed—a hostage in a house with people who wanted me for God only knew what—I let out a faint whimper. It took every ounce of willpower I had to keep myself from succumbing to hysteria. I focused on thinking clearly, calmly.
I needed to burn every detail of my surroundings into my mind for later. The wheelchair in the corner to my right. The way the door had popped open a millisecond before the man pulled it shut again, like the latch might be broken. The gap in the window that I needed to pass in hopes of getting a glimpse outside.
Most of all, I needed to keep my mind busy, so I didn’t dwell on the fact that my Ability was apparently gone, and with it all sense of security and hope. I didn’t know when or if my Ability would come back, and it had been so long since I’d been without it I wasn’t sure how I would survive if it never did.
I needed to come up with a plan.
23
DANI
DECEMBER 14, 1AE
The Farm, California
Unhooking a hanger from a circular clothes rack, I held the tank top hanging from it up against my chest. It was super soft cotton, slightly loose and flowy, and the color fell somewhere in the spectrum between green and yellow. “What do you think, Zo? Too yellow?” Green I could do—it was my favorite clothing color—but yellow, not so much.
Zoe paused from flipping through hanger after hanger of leather jackets to look over her shoulder at me. “It’s cute. A little too girly for me, but very you, D.” She scrunched her nose. “But…”
I straightened and glanced down at the tank top. “What?”
“It doesn’t really go with your guns.”
Reflexively, I adjusted the cross-body strap of my automatic rifle, then glanced at the three men standing side by side with their backs to a wall of bladed weapons that wouldn’t have been out of place in a medieval armory. “What do you guys think?”
Gabe, tallest of all and looking angelic with his golden hair and crisp white button-down shirt, shrugged.
Cam, with his soulful eyes and wistful smile, sighed and nodded. “I like it, D.”
And Jason, standing in the middle and somehow dominating the space with his powerful stance and expressionless, scarred face, tilted his head to the side ever s
o slightly. “Not very practical, is it? Not good for farming…not good for scavenging…”
I pulled my bottom lip between my teeth. “Oh, well…” I blinked, and the three men standing nearby changed horribly. Their clothes were torn and stained with browns and reds, their skin was sunken, sallow, and seemed to be slipping off of them, and their eyes were dull and milky. “Oh God, no!” I shrieked, lurching toward them, then freezing in place.
In the next blink, Jason, Cam, and Gabe returned to normal.
“So it’s this again?”
I spun around to find another version of Gabe, this one standing beside Zoe and her rack of leather jackets. Blinking several times, I shook my head in confusion. “What? Huh?”
Gabe made his way around the clothes rack to his dreamtime duplicate, who was now flashing back and forth between living and walking dead with every heartbeat. He stared at it a moment, then sighed. “And here I’d thought it was such a good thing that you’re sleeping again.”
“I don’t—” I shook my head, dispelling cobwebs of confusion. “You’re really you, aren’t you?” I glanced around in wonder at the shop’s now odd-seeming combination of girly and badass clothing options and antique weapons collection. It had seemed so normal before… “I’m really dreaming?” I’d had the one dream of that day, when I’d somehow, seemingly by sheer force of will, managed to get some sleep. But that had been a couple nights ago, and I hadn’t been able to duplicate whatever I’d done, no matter how hard I’d tried. Until now, it seemed.
Gabe nodded. “Congrats. And welcome back.” He wound his way back around the clothing racks until he was standing before me. “How are you doing?” He glanced down at my middle. “And how’s the little one?” His pale blue eyes returned to mine; part of me expected his to flash to a milky white like his dream doppelgänger.
I shut my eyes and shook my head. Opening them again, I said, “We’re good. Progressing full-speed ahead, as expected. Harper said he’d place me at around twelve weeks if he didn’t know otherwise, but we’re really only at five or so.” Which meant my child was developing about twice as fast as a normal human child…and about on par with Sarah’s twins. I flashed him a shy smile and placed my hand on my abdomen. “Chris says that means it’s about as big as a lime…and that I should start showing soon.”
Gabe’s lips spread into a smile, but I could tell that his heart wasn’t in it.
“What?” I reached for him, gripping his forearm. “What is it? Why are you here? And why hasn’t Sanchez checked in?”
He met my eyes, then looked away. “There’s been an accident. The van…” He exhaled heavily and ran his fingers through his shoulder-length hair. “Tavis…he didn’t make it.”
An accident? Tavis didn’t make it? My thoughts swirled as I tried to understand.
“Sanchez couldn’t contact you guys because she’s been mostly unconscious since the crash,” Gabe continued. “And Jake’s been shot, so he’s out of it, at least for now.” Gabe’s eyes met mine, and he hesitated before saying, “We’re holed up in a hotel just outside of Sacramento until they’ve recovered a little. Becca, Tom, and I have made a few trips out, gathering what food and weapons we can carry back from the van—”
I swallowed roughly, my heart beating too quickly. “And—and Zo?”
Gabe looked at me with such intensity it was like he was looking into my soul. “We don’t know. She wasn’t anywhere to be found when Tom came to, and he was the first, so…”
I looked at dream-Zoe, standing placidly by, still holding that leather jacket, and shook my head. “Well, she wouldn’t have just wandered off.”
“We know.”
“So you think someone took her?”
“That’s exactly what we think.”
“My God…” I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing doing so would block out the truth of what had happened. “Alright, tell me everything.”
~~~~~
I woke up feeling ancient. And worried. And absolutely sick and tired of others stealing whatever precious time my people—my family—had left to spend with one another. It barely even registered that I’d been dreaming, that I’d actually slept through the whole night.
I sat up, for once without the familiar twist of nausea, and rolled my neck, using the almost painful stretch as a chance to piece together what I remembered from the dream with Gabe. Of course, only one thing mattered—or four things, really—they’d crashed the van, Tavis was dead, Jake had been shot, and Zoe was missing.
“Chris,” I said hoarsely and shook the pregnancy cobwebs from my brain. Where’s Chris? I fumbled for the watch on my nightstand. What time is it?
Almost six in the morning, it turned out. I glanced at the heavy green curtains pulled across the bedroom’s two small windows. The sky would start to lighten soon, though the sun wouldn’t rise for another hour. At this time of the morning, I knew exactly where I would find Chris. Which was just as well, because I needed to fill Harper in, too.
Zo’s missing…
I hastily scooted to the edge of the bed and slid my feet into wool-lined moccasins, then retrieved my down coat off one of the hooks behind the door. I could feel Annie in her room, her mind a gentle hum rather than the bright beacon it was when she was conscious. Over the long months, I’d come to recognize this as meaning she was drifting. Unlike my other companions, Annie’s mind never faded from my radar completely, because unlike the others, Annie never actually slept. She rested, true—her mind had adapted to her Ability in ways it seemed that mine never would—but she never actually slept, not anymore.
“Jack,” I said telepathically to my dog, who was gazing up at me from his curled position on the bed. “Stay with Annie and bring her to me in the big house if she wakes up.”
With a stretch, he made his way off the bed, and the click of nails on hardwood marked his path out of my bedroom and down the short hallway to Annie’s door. He yawned dramatically, then settled on his belly and rested his head on his crossed paws.
“Thank you, Sweet Boy.”
His ears perked forward, and the small dark patches above his eyes that I always thought of as his doggy eyebrows rose. As I turned to leave, I could feel a deep sense of contentment and affection coming from him through our bond.
“Love you too, Jack,” I said as I rushed to the front door as quietly as possible. The fire I’d built up in the fireplace the previous night was nothing but half-dead embers now, but it still produced a small amount of heat. A fact that was made more evident by the burst of chilly, almost freezing air that greeted me when I opened the door.
Zo’s missing…Zo’s missing…Zo’s missing…
I left the cottage and practically ran along the slippery path to the farmhouse. Once inside, Chris and Harper’s bedroom was only a short trip up the creaky stairs to the first room on the right side of the hallway. I knocked on their door quietly. There was no response, so I repeated the knock, but with more gusto. One more time…
I could hear lazy footsteps on the other side of the door. This house was so old that it reflected every movement with a unique, usually complaintive sound of its own. “Is that you, Sam?” Chris’s voice was hoarse with sleep. “Did you have another bad dr—” She was clearly surprised to find me standing in the hallway instead. “Dani?”
My chin started trembling, my eyes stinging.
Zo’s missing…
“What is it? What happened?” She scanned me from head to toe. “Is Annie alright?”
I nodded even as my chest started convulsing with my mounting distress. Shock had worn off, and reality was setting in. First Jason had been abducted, now Zoe. And the others were all either injured or—or…poor Tavis. “The van,” I said. “There was an—an accident.” It was all I managed to get out before grief took over.
“Alright, shhh,” Chris said as she draped an arm over my shoulders and guided me into the bedroom. “Take your time.” I heard the door shut. “And when you’re ready, tell us what happened.”
In minutes, I was back to a relatively coherent state. I sniffed and wiped my nose on my sleeve. Clearing my throat, I looked first at Chris, then at Harper, who was sitting on the foot of the bed. “Gabe came to me in a dream.”
Chris’s eyebrows rose. “So you were sleeping? Really sleeping?”
I nodded. “Up until Gabe pulled me out of the dream. My first full drift-free night since Jason…”
Chris blew out a breath. “Well that’s something, at least.”
I sniffed again. “Gabe told me they crashed the van. Said they were all knocked out for a while, and when they came to, Zo was gone and Tavis—” I breathed in shakily, the echo of my heaving sobs fresh in my chest. “Tavis is dead.”
“Shit,” Chris groaned.
Harper scrubbed his face with one hand. “Zoe might’ve been disoriented and wandered off. If it just happened last night—”
I shook my head. “It was the night before last. They got as far as Sacramento.”
Harper’s hand clenched into a fist, which he slowly lowered to the bed. He pressed his fist into the mattress so hard that his arm was shaking. “Then why didn’t they contact us sooner?”
I shrugged. “I guess Sanchez was knocked unconscious during the crash, and she’s been having a hard time with her Ability since then, and Gabe’s been sort of busy trying to salvage what they could from the crash and Jake’s in one of his healing trances…so they’ve got a lot going on. And with everything, I guess they decided to wait to contact us until they had some concrete information to give us.” I looked at Harper and took a deep breath. “Zoe didn’t wander off. It wasn’t the crash that killed Tavis.” My voice rose in pitch. “It was a gun. And Jake—” After several more deep breaths, I regained some of my unraveling composure. “They shot Jake, too, but…you know.”
The Ending Series: The Complete Series Page 151